She looks at him for a moment and then nods, her shoulders dropping slightly with the relief of it.
"Good." He picks up his bag and grins at her, the easy Rafael smirk sliding back into place. "You're in good hands here." He glances at me briefly. "Allegedly."
She laughs, genuine and soft, and walks him to the car while I stay on the porch. I watch Rafael say something to her that makes her shake her head and smile. He gets in the car. The engine turns over and the gravel crunches under the tires and then he's gone, disappearing around the bend.
Just us. Again.
Isabella comes back up the steps and stands beside me, looking out at where the car disappeared, and the morning quiet settles around us.
"Does it bother you?" she asks.
I look at her. "Does what bother me?"
"What you did yesterday. The man." She keeps her eyes forward. "Do you feel anything? Remorse?"
"No," I say.
She nods, like she expected that and was checking whether I'd lie. "Violence scares me. It always has, even growing up in this life." She turns and looks at me directly. "But yours doesn't. Your violence doesn't scare me and I've been trying to figure out why."
Something moves through my chest, quiet and uncomfortable.
"It should," I tell her. "It should terrify you. The fact that it doesn't is a problem."
"Why?"
"Because I don't lose sleep over the things I've done. I don't feel remorse or guilt. I don't lie awake going over faces." I hold her gaze because she deserves the unvarnished version. "I feel nothing. And a woman who isn't afraid of that is a woman who's going to end up too close to something she can't come back from."
She's quiet for a moment, the pale morning light catching her face.
"Why did you kill them?" she asks. "Every person you've ever killed. Why?"
I don't answer immediately.
"Because they were a danger," I say finally. "To Matteo. To the people I protect. To—" I stop.
"To people you love," she finishes quietly.
The word sits between us.
I don't confirm it. I don't deny it. I just look at her standing there in my shirt with her bare feet on the cold porch and feel the full weight of how much trouble I'm in.
"That's what scares me," I say, quieter than I mean to. "That you're not afraid of me. It scares me more than anything else."
She holds my gaze for one long moment and then she turns and goes inside.
I stay on the porch another while.
I spend the rest of the morning making myself useful.
The perimeter gets checked twice. Both guns cleaned and reassembled. The sticking latch on the back door gets fixed. The sensor grid gets reviewed. I run through every exit route from the cabin twice more in my head even though I have them memorized well enough to do it in my sleep.
I do all of it methodically and carefully because staying methodical and careful is the only thing between me and the disaster of last night, of her hands fisted in my shirt and her gasp against my shoulder and her body pressed against mine in the amber kitchen light.
I don't go near her.
After last night I cannot go near her without finishing what I started, so I keep my distance and I keep busy and by two in the afternoon I've run out of things to fix.
I sit at the kitchen table with my phone and a cup of coffee and check messages from Matteo. Routine updates. Nothing new from the O'Rourkes. Everything quiet on the outside while the inside of this cabin is anything but.
